Digital transformation has changed modern healthcare. Technologies like medical computers, Internet of Medical Things, and electronic medical records aim to solve the sector’s ever-spiralling challenges, from record-keeping to staff shortages. Medical branches like hospice and palliative care are tapping the latest innovation – artificial intelligence – to overcome their unique issues.
Hospice, Palliative Care, and AI
Hospice care provides care and comfort for terminal patients due to age or serious illness. When a patient is “terminal” is determined by the hospice provider, though it’s usually six months or less.
Palliative care provides that same care and comfort to patients with severe conditions but who are not necessarily terminal.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a digital technology that simulates human thinking in a computer. Image recognition, data-based predictions, and even poetry generation are examples of AI.
AI can be divided into several broad categories.
- Capability: Narrow, General, and Superintelligent.
- Functionality: Reactive Machinery, Limited Memory, Theory of the Mind, Self-Aware
- Technology: Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Natural Language Processing, Robotics, Computer Vision, and Expert Systems.
How AI Meets Challenges in Hospice and Palliative Care
Much of the healthcare industry centers around patient care and the challenges it brings. Hospice and palliative care differ because there are no longer treatments to cure or manage the patient’s health concerns. Instead, health care now revolves around the patient’s comfort, care, and quality of life until they reach the end.
Here are three ways AI aids in improving hospice and palliative care.
Personalized care
Each patient in hospice and palliative care poses their own unique challenges ranging from age, degree of infirmary, to illness. A severely premature newborn requires different forms of end-of-life treatment than a ninety-year-old with dementia and renal failure.
Medical staff can configure their medical AI box PCs to tailor care plans personalized around each patient’s unique needs, preferences, and medical history. AI-crafted feeding schedules, for example, can be generated for the previously mentioned newborn based on similar cases. On the other hand, the ninety-year-old’s pain medication regimen comes from their medical history, previous responses to treatment, etc.
Predicative analytics and AI-based nudge
A “nudge” is an alert or reminder generated by artificial intelligence: specifically, machine learning. This form of AI goes through the patient’s electronic medical records and Medicare data, looking for signs of impending mortality (predictive analytics). The nudge is then sent to the hospice provider, who decides whether to discuss palliative or hospice care with the patient.
The hope with nudges is to better prepare patients for end-of-life care and ensure that no one fails to receive such care due to “cracks” in the healthcare system.
Resource Optimization
Like all forms of health care, hospice and palliative care is a complex web of specialists and staff, as well as their departments, organizations, and agencies. For example, care for the above ninety-year-old involves their providers, nurses, caretakers, the hospice facility, and all the various governmental and insurance agencies, to name a few.
To enhance the overall operational effectiveness of all these parties, AI is being used to provide:
- Assessment goes through all the patient’s data, like EMR and providers’ notes, to provide treatment plans to identifying any additional challenges like new disease processes.
- Electronic Medical Record (EMR) is the patient’s ongoing medical file, which the AI uses to identify patterns in the patient’s health, like possible end-of-life date(s).
- Eligibility verification, in which the AI goes over the patient’s insurance and verifies they are eligible to receive the appropriate care, whether regular health care, palliative, or hospice.
- Patient onboarding processes all the complex and numerous paperwork to bring the patient into a hospital ASAP.
- Prior authorization is similar to eligibility verification, except the AI ensures all paperwork is processed correctly to receive hospice care.
- Responsive Service Intensity Add On has the AI sending an SIA (Serious Incident Alert) when the patient needs additional financial resources and can’t wait to go through the traditional and time-consuming process to obtain them.
- Revenue Cycle Management, or RCM, is when the AI ensures all appropriate billing paperwork is filled out and submitted to government and insurance agencies for prompt payment.
Choosing the Right AI Computer Solution
Medical AI computers are the best choice in running AI for palliative and hospice care. Medical computers built by true computer manufacturers are constructed to handle medicine’s unique requirements with features like 60601 certified (medical grade) and IP65 sealed front bezels. AI medical PCs build upon this base with the following:
- Graphic Processing Units from NVIDIA to handle AI’s intense parallel processing during machine learning, deep learning, and other processes.
- Central Processing Units for standard, non-AI operations like data storage and network connectivity.
- Large amounts of memory and disc space for the processing and storage of data..
Help Hospice Patients Rest Easy with Cybernet Medical AI Computers
Handling patients nearing the end of their life is never easy. Healthcare’s palliative and hospice branches are turning to artificial intelligence to handle patients’ increasingly complex issues as well as the bureaucracies involved in their comfort and care.
Contact the Cybernet Manufacturing team if you want to bring AI to your palliative and hospice facilities. Our team members will happily cover why our medical-grade computer lineup is the right medical AI solution for your needs. Finally, as an Original Equipment and Design Manufacturer, we can further customize our products to meet your exact demands and specifications.